Information Technology (“IT”) has enabled enterprises to more accurately monitor and control critical aspects of their business such as inventory. With accurate, timely inventory data an enterprise can order supplies and build products in a timely manner, thereby reducing the possibilities of running short of supplies or products, and storing more product than can be sold in a reasonably short amount of time. However, recent trends in business practices have made it more difficult for some enterprises to obtain accurate and timely inventory data.
It is now common for suppliers to large retailers to retain ownership of products up until the time of purchase. Further, the suppliers may be held responsible for maintaining a sufficient supply of product in the stores. Obtaining accurate and timely inventory data under such circumstances is difficult because, apart from manually monitoring the stores, the inventory data can only be obtained via the network of the retailer. Referring to FIG. 1, the retailer or supplier may tag products with Radio Frequency ID (“RFID”) tags (100) which are detectable by RFID readers (102) positioned in the store so that it becomes possible to automatically determine how many units (104) of a given product are on the store shelves. Data from all RFID readers in a store, and even from multiple stores, may be provided to the retailer's RFID Event Management System (106), and subsequently to a data center (108) via a Virtual Local Area Network (“VLAN”) on an Enterprise IP network (110). However, in order to prevent a given supplier, e.g., supplier (112), from obtaining sensitive data associated with the retailer or other suppliers (114, 116) it is necessary to limit the supplier's access to data in the data center (108). In particular, it is necessary for the retailer to determine which supplier provided the product for each supplier inquiry about a product in order to limit the access of supplier (112) access to only data associated with product provided by that supplier (112). This can be complicated and time consuming because associations between products and suppliers are manually entered by the retailer, e.g., via an RFID back office station (118), and a retailer may sell many different types of products, change product lines frequently, and obtain particular products from multiple suppliers. For these and other reasons suppliers would like to have technology that eliminates the need for them to maintain a large centralized database from their warehouse by shifting responsibility for data retrieval and retention to the individual suppliers.